BARview: Tell el-Amarna Conference Grueling but Stimulating

The Middle West Branch of the American Oriental Society (AOS) has hit on a marvelous idea. Every couple of years, it devotes its annual meeting—a two-day affair—to a particular archaeological site that has produced an important ancient archive. Then the papers delivered at the meeting are collected in a published volume.

In 1979, the meeting was devoted to Ugarit, an ancient city on the Syrian coast that produced a 14th- to 13th-century B.C. cuneiform archive in a Canaanite language known to scholars as Ugaritic.^a The book that resulted from that meeting, Ugarit in Retrospect, was published by Eisenbrauns in 1981.

In 1983, it was Mari’s turn. Located close to the Euphrates River in ancient Mesopotamia, Mari was a thriving center during the third and early second millennia B.C. The archaeological and epigraphical finds from Mari may illuminate the history of Hebrew origins and provide important data for Biblical research. The volume on Mari, Mari at Fifty, is expected out later this year.